Retweets Do Not Equal Clicks, According to Study

Good news - your tweet exploded across the Twitterverse! Hundreds of people retweeted your latest article, how awesome is that! Although social media can drive plenty of traffic to your site and you should always be happy when your content goes viral - that magical "retweet" metric may be a little deceiving.

They may be retweeting, but that doesn't mean they're clicking.

HubSpot's Dan Zarrella looked at 2.7 million tweets that contained links and found absolutely no correlation between retweets and clicks. And the click to retweet ratio was far from 1:1. He found that 16.12% of the tweets had more retweets than clicks on the link, and 14.64% of the retweeted tweets hade zero clicks.

That means that a significant portion of Twitter users are retweeting your links without opening them up.

Blame it on Twitter bots or blame it on real users. The point is this: just because your tweet received a lot of retweets, it doesn't mean that people were actually visiting your site and checking out your content.